Shelf Life

Packing up my father-in-law’s library.

Our libraries may say less about us than we imagine. “Agnon’s Library” (2006), by Yuval Yairi.Credit Photograph by Andrea Meislin Gallery

Yet, he said, it is often our mightiest projects that most obviously betray the degree of our insecurity.

W. G. Sebald, “Austerlitz.”

Route 12D, north of Utica, New York, south of Fort Drum and Carthage, runs through poor, shabby countryside. In the unravelled townships, there are trailers and collapsed farmhouses. Here and there, a new silo, shining like a chrome torpedo, suggests a fresh start, or maybe just the arrival of agribusiness. The pall of lost prosperity hangs heavily. Heavily? No, to the skimming driver aiming elsewhere it falls only vaguely.

In Talcottville, an example of that lost prosperity can be seen from the road—a grand, fine limestone house with a white double-storied porch. The house is anomalous, both in its size and in its proximity to the road. But for a long time it must have been the house’s contents that were truly anomalous: a careful, distinguished library of thousands of volumes. For this was Edmund Wilson’s family home, built at the end of the eighteenth century by the Talcotts, one of whom married Wilson’s great-grandfather. It was the place the literary critic most happily returned to in later life, though never uncomplicatedly. In his journal of life in Talcottville, “Upstate,” Wilson expresses his love for the region, while grumbling, in an old man’s crooked jabs, about the bad restaurants and intellectually modest company. “In a sense, it has always been stranded,” he once wrote of the property. It was here that he died, one morning in June, 1972.

I used to drive past Edmund Wilson’s house on my way to Canada, to visit my wife’s parents. Though in apparently reasonable shape, the Wilson home always seemed closed up, forgotten, and in some ways it is the fate of such a house, ignored by a newer road, to seem chronically forgotten. In my mind, I could see into the library, see those shelves and shelves of eloquent, mute books, sunk in themselves like a rotting paper harvest, the ancient, classical authors gesturing in puzzlement to the classical New World place-names of New York State: Rome, Troy, Ithaca, Syracuse.

My father-in-law died last year, and my mother-in-law is ailing, so this summer my wife and I drove up to their house, to empty it for sale. Again we passed the Wilson house, and again I thought about the silent longevity of his books, and the strange incommunicability of that defunct library, uselessly posthumous, once sleeping by the side of this provincial road. I knew that what awaited us in Canada was the puzzle of how to dispose of my father-in-law’s library, a collection of about four thousand books, similarly asleep, in a large Victorian house in the flat, open fields of rural Ontario. We would take perhaps a hundred books back to Boston, but had no room in our house for more. And then what?

François-Michel Messud, my father-in-law, was a complicated, difficult, brilliant man. He was born in France but spent his early childhood nomadically, in Beirut, Istanbul, and Salonica, before the family settled down in Algiers. In the early nineteen-fifties, he came to America, as one of the first Fulbright scholars, and stayed on to do graduate work in Middle Eastern studies. He married Margaret Riches, from Toronto, and the young couple spent their early years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he began a Ph.D. on Turkish politics. For six months of academic field work, they lived in Ankara, an experience they always cherished. (My mother-in-law, whose upbringing had been landlocked and largely Canadian, wrote wide-eyed letters about Turkish life to her parents in Toronto.) Eventually, though, my father-in-law abandoned the Ph.D., and went into business, a decision probably born of academic anxiety and patriarchal masochism. He was not a natural businessman, and retained the instincts of a scholar and traveller. His mind was worldly, with little hospitality toward literature or music. What interested him were societies, tribes, roots, exile, journeys, languages. I found him hard to love, easier to admire, and I rather feared him.

Educated in an austere French environment, a child of the deprivations of the nineteen-thirties and forties (he remembered that Jacques Derrida was in his class in high school in Algiers: “not then a very good pupil”), he could be captious, censorious, bullying. After six in the evening, when cocktails made everything hazardous, one learned to tread carefully, for fear of splashing into an error that might be roughly corrected. Not to know precisely who the Phoenicians were (not to know where they came from and when they flourished); not to know the names of the two most famous mosques in Istanbul, or the history of the civil war in Lebanon, or the ethnic composition of the Balkans; not to recall exactly who said “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” or to flub a French phrase, or to praise something by Bruce Chatwin (“I could do what that little guy does, travelling and writing about his travels,” my father-in-law once told me), was to court swift disdain.

I was grateful not to be his son; his anxious male authority was so different from my reticent father’s that I was alternately impressed and alienated by it. Once, early in my marriage, when I had been living in France for a few months and my ability with the language was improving, we were at dinner, and someone at the table praised me for my increased fluency. Everyone else nicely agreed. “I don’t see why I should praise you yet,” my father-in-law broke in. “It’s a very small improvement and you have a long way to go.” I knew he would say it, hated him for it, agreed with him.

He liked to recount the story of arriving from France, at Amherst College in 1952, and being told by his American roommate that he would never really master English. “I could speak it fluently by Christmas,” he would say. Whether the story was true or not, he spoke perfect English, without a French accent, except for a tendency to pronounce “tongue” as “tong,” and “swan” as if he were saying “swam.” He had the foreigner’s Nabokovian love of exhuming dead puns; was tirelessly amused, for instance, by the fact that the Archbishop of Canterbury is officially known as Primate of All England, and therefore “should be called Chief Chimp.”

Tribes and societies interested him because he grew up in a tribe, left it for a society, and belonged to neither. His tribe was French-Algerian: the pieds noirs, the European colonists who began arriving in Algeria in the mid-nineteenth century, and abandoned it en masse at the end of the war for independence, in 1962. Like most pieds noirs, he never returned, after independence, to the country of his childhood, so that Algeria—and indeed a whole world of Francophone North African experience—could be experienced only in the mind, always practically lost. France, the larger home, was an ambiguous pleasure, as for many of the returning colonists. Although his sister settled in Toulon, he never showed much interest in the country, and was refreshingly free of the usual maddening French superiority. Instead, he came to America, where he lived most of his adult life. But he was not an especially eager immigrant, or a willing democrat. Once the early excitements of the Fulbright and graduate school waned, he settled into a familiar European alienation. He lived a lifetime in America, worked here (for a French company), paid his taxes, read The New York Review of Books, bought shirts and underwear at Brooks Brothers, and went to new shows at the Metropolitan Museum, but he was not an American. Increasingly, American society bewildered and irritated him; the vulgarities and democratic banalities that are merely routinely annoying to educated Americans, or are written off as part of the price of dynamic vitality, gnawed at him. He floated on top of American life, privileged, wounded, unmoored.

Perhaps the most important book in his study was a huge atlas, wide open on a wooden lectern, the pages turned daily; sometimes we would catch him standing at the lectern, peering down at the dense, abstract grids of some newfound interest. Travel and reading allowed him to collect a frail library of experience. Each trip (to Egypt, Greece, Indonesia, Peru, Morocco, Burma, India, Russia) was thoroughly prepared for with advance reading and orderly itineraries, and then preserved—usually by his wife—in photographs of buildings and cities: pyramids, temples, mosques, streets, columns, ruins.

He read in the same way, following interests, like an army moving along a line of supply, and searching out all the available books on a particular subject. Someone once made fun of Edmund Wilson’s relentlessness, because Wilson said that, when writing an essay, he was “working my way through the oeuvre” of a writer. My father-in-law was no Edmund Wilson (to start with, he never wrote anything), and, as he got older and busier, he acquired far more books than he could read, but there was a similar voracity. The acquisition of a book signalled not just the potential acquisition of knowledge but also something like the property rights to a piece of ground: the knowledge became a visitable place. His immediate surroundings, American or Canadian, were of no great interest to him; I never heard him speak with any excitement about Manhattan, for instance. But the Alhambra in 1492, or the Salonica he remembered from childhood (the great prewar center of Sephardic Jewry, where, he recalled, there were newspapers printed in Hebrew characters), or the Constantinople of the late Byzantine Empire, were . . . what? If I say they were “alive” for him (the usual cliché), then I make him sound more scholarly, and perhaps more imaginative, than he was. It would be closer to the truth to say that such places were facts for him, in a way that Manhattan and Toronto (and even Paris) were not.

And yet these facts were largely incommunicable. He spent his time among businessmen, not scholars. He rarely invited people to dinner, and could be emphatic and monologic. He tended to flourish his facts as querulous challenges rather than as invitations to conversation, though this wasn’t perhaps his real intention. So there always seemed to be a quality of self-defense about the greedy rate at which he acquired books, as if he were putting on layers of clothing to protect against the drafts of exile.

Libraries are always paradoxical: they are as personal as the collector, and at the same time are an ideal statement of knowledge that is impersonal, because it is universal, abstract, and so much larger than an individual life. Susan Sontag once said to me that her essays were more intelligent than she was, because she worked so hard at them, and expanded into them over several months of writing. I murmured something banal about how the critic conducts his education in public, and she bristled. Gesturing toward her huge library, she said, with irritation, “That isn’t what I meant. I’ve read all these books.” I didn’t believe her, since no one has read one’s entire library; and it seemed stubborn of her not to comprehend what I intended to say, which was simply that, like her essays, her library was also more intelligent than she was.

This was acutely true of my father-in-law’s library, which was not, like Sontag’s or Wilson’s, a working library but an underemployed collection for a working mind. My father-in-law’s will to completion—his need to encompass a subject by buying all the available books and putting them on display—represented an ideal, a kind of abstract utopia, a recovered country free of vicissitudes. A long shelf of careful, brilliant books, all devoted to one subject, was the best possible life that subject could enjoy. Here is the first foot of his two shelves on Burma: “Kinship and Marriage in Burma,” by Melford E. Spiro; “Political Systems of Highland Burma,” by E. R. Leach; “Forgotten Land: A Rediscovery of Burma,” by Harriet O’Brien; “Burmese Administrative Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest, c. 1580-1760,” by Victor B. Lieberman; “Return to Burma,” by Bernard Fergusson; “Burma and Beyond,” by Sir J. George Scott; “Finding George Orwell in Burma,” by Emma Larkin; “A History of Modern Burma,” by Michael W. Charney. And here are the first entries of two or three shelves devoted to Judaism and Jewry: “A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789-1939,” by David Vital; “Vilna on the Seine: Jewish Intellectuals in France since 1968,” by Judith Friedlander; “Moments of Crisis in Jewish-Christian Relations,” by Marc Saperstein; “The Russian Jew Under Tsars and Soviets,” by Salo W. Baron; “Le Salut par les Juifs,” by Léon Bloy; “Les Juifs d’Espagne: Histoire d’une Diaspora, 1492-1992,” edited by Henry Méchoulan. He had three or four hundred books on aspects of the Byzantine Empire, and probably twice that number on Islamic and Middle Eastern subjects.

I spent the first few days in Canada cataloguing the Middle Eastern books, in the hope that we might be able to keep the books on Islam and Muslim societies intact, and perhaps give them to an institution—a college, a school, a local library, even a mosque. The librarian in charge of Islamic books at McGill University had kindly agreed to look at such a catalogue. It was slow, intricate, engrossing work—fifty-eight books on Egypt alone, from Alfred J. Butler’s “The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion,” first published in 1902, to Florence Nightingale’s letters from her journey on the Nile, to Taha Hussein’s memoir, “An Egyptian Childhood,” originally published in Cairo in 1929.

But it soon became apparent that no one really wants hundreds or thousands of old books. E-mails sent to the local university were unanswered. Someone told us about a public library in a town in Alberta that had burned to the ground. They were going to rebuild, and needed donations. I was ready to ship hundreds. But the Web site requested only books published in the last two years, which excluded almost everything in my father-in-law’s library. Kingston, the nearest big town, had a thriving secondhand book business, so I called one of those shops. Would the owner like to come out to a rural house, about forty minutes from the city, and look over a good library of several thousand volumes? The answer was sympathetic and dismaying. There used to be twelve secondhand bookshops in Kingston, the bookseller told me, and now there are four: “We have the storage space but no money. The shop around the corner has the money to buy books but no space. This summer, at least three big private collections have come onto the market. So I’m afraid it’s just not worth it for me to come out to a house and look at four thousand books.” It wasn’t clear who was supposed to feel sorrier for whom.

We had a couple of breaks. An online bookseller, who deals in rare books and first editions, came and picked through what interested him, and filled his old Volvo with boxes. A few days later, an English bibliophile, who teaches philosophy at Queen’s University, did the same. I enjoyed their obvious excitement, my enjoyment tempered by the sensation that the library was suffering death by a thousand cuts. For in any private library the totality of books is meaningful, while each individual volume is relatively meaningless. Or, rather, once separated from its family, each individual book becomes relatively meaningless in relation to the original collector, but suddenly newly meaningful as the totality of the author’s mind. The lovely book “Mecca: A Literary History of the Muslim Holy Land,” by the great New York University scholar F. E. Peters, says nothing about my father-in-law, except that he bought it (and, to judge by its pristinity, only bought it); but it represents a distillation of Professor Peters’s lifework. In this strange way, our libraries are like certain paintings that, as you get closer to the canvas, become separate and unreadable blobs and daubs of paint.

And in this way, I began to think, our libraries perhaps say nothing very particular about us at all. Each brick in the wall of a library is a borrowed brick: several thousand people, perhaps several hundred thousand, own books by F. E. Peters. If I were led into Edmund Wilson’s library in Talcottville, would I know that it was Edmund Wilson’s library, and not Alfred Kazin’s or F. W. Dupee’s? We tend to venerate libraries once we know whose they are, like admiring a famous philosopher’s eyes or a ballet dancer’s foot. Pushkin had about a thousand non-Russian books in his library, and the editor of “Pushkin on Literature” helpfully lists all those foreign books, from Balzac and Stendhal to Shakespeare and Voltaire. She confidently announces that “much can be learnt of a man from his choice of books,” and then unwittingly contradicts herself by adding that Pushkin, like many other Russians of his class, read mostly in French: “The ancient classics, the Bible, Dante, Machiavelli, Luther, Shakespeare, Leibnitz, Byron . . . all are predominantly in French.” This sounds like the library of an extremely well-read Russian gentleman, circa 1830—the kind of reading that Pushkin gave to his standard-issue Russian romantic, Eugene Onegin. But what is especially Pushkinian about the library? What does it tell us about his mind?

Theodor Adorno, in his essay “On Popular Music,” pours disdain on the way in which, when we hear a popular hit, we think we are making a personal possession of it (“That’s my song, the song that was playing when I first kissed X”), while in fact this “apparently isolated, individual experience of a particular song” is being shared with millions of other people—so that the listener merely “feels safety in numbers and follows the crowd of all those who have heard the song before and who are supposed to have made its reputation.” Adorno, the grand snob, considers this a grave deception. But, in a digital age, we surely treat serious classical music in just the same way. And how is a library—in one way of thinking about it, at least—anything but the same kind of self-deception? Isn’t a private library simply a universal legacy pretending to be an individual one?

Adorno hated the way that capitalism, and the branch of it he called the Culture Industry, turned impalpabilities like art works into things. But there is no escaping that books are most definitely things, and I was struck, as I worked through my father-in-law’s books, how quickly I became alienated from their rather stupid materiality. I began to resent his avariciousness, which resembled, in death, any other kind of avariciousness for objects. Again and again, his daughters had begged him to “do something” about his books before he died. Meaning, We can’t take them. If he understood that, he did nothing about it, and sorting out his library became sadly indistinguishable from sorting out his pictures or his CDs or his shirts. And though my task was easy compared with my mourning wife’s, the experience made me resolve not to leave behind such burdens for my children. How one relishes Montaigne’s words: “I want death to find me planting my cabbages, but careless of death, and still more of my unfinished garden.”

I remember hearing about an accident that befell the scholar and critic Frank Kermode, several years ago. He was moving, and had put boxes filled with all his most precious books (his fiction, his poetry, his signed first editions, and the like) on the street. The garbage collectors came by, and mistakenly took the boxes, leaving Kermode with a great deal of contemporary literary theory. The story once seemed horrifying to me; now it seems almost wonderful. To be abruptly lightened like that, so that one’s descendants might not be burdened! After all, can I really contend that my collection of books, ranged on shelves like some bogus declaration of achievement (for surely the philistine is right to ask the man of culture, “Have you really read all these?”), tells my children anything more about me than my much smaller collection of postcards and photographs? (W. G. Sebald’s work explores this paradox of permanence: a single photograph of a book-filled room might be more redolent of its owner than the books themselves.)

The more time I spent with my father-in-law’s books, the more profoundly they seemed to be not revealing him but hiding him, like some word-wreathed, untranslatable mausoleum. His Algerian childhood, his intellectual ambition, the diversion of that ambition into run-of-the-mill moneymaking, his isolation and estrangement in America, his confidence and shyness, pugilism and anxiety, the drinking and the anger and the passion and the pressurized conformity of his businesslike existence: of course, in some general way, these thousands of volumes—neatly systematic, proudly comprehensive—incarnated the shape of this life, but not the facets of his character. The books somehow made him smaller, not larger, as if they were whispering, “What a little thing a single human life is, with all its busy, ephemeral, pointless projects.” All ruins say this, yet we strangely persist in pretending that books are not ruins, not broken columns.

One of my father-in-law’s busy, ephemeral projects fell out of a book about Greek history. A single sheet of paper, with notes written in his careful hand. The date was 2/1/95, and the notes were preparation for a trip to Greece: “History of Ancient Greece. Jean Hatzfeld and André Aymard, N.Y., Norton 1966.” Under this heading were lines in English:

— Common language and tradition but very divided. Hellas = culture, civiliz. (“Hellenes” does not come until 800 BC. “Greek” is Roman.)

— Geographic identity between Greece and Western Asia Minor: the sea is due to a subsidence which broke up a continent of recent formation and whose structure was very complicated—fjords, deep bays, mountains, capes, islands.

And so on, down the page. On the overleaf, he had made a rough drawing of ancient Greece and Western Asia Minor (present-day Turkey). It was his entire world: on one side the Mediterranean, and on the other the Aegean, West and East. He had marked the most famous places, and circled them: on the Asia Minor side, Aeolia, Lycia, Troy, Phrygia; and on the Greek side the honeyed, haunted, lost names—Illyria, Elis, Attica, Argolis, Arcadia. ♦

James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007.